I scream, you scream

Published 4:00 am, Friday, December 12, 1997

The slasher-horror cycle of films of the 1970s and '80s eventually self-destructed, fading into a dismal series of ever-poorer sequels. Last year, director Wes Craven, one of the prime movers behind the cycle, surprised everyone - including his backers - by pumping fresh blood into the genre with "Scream," an in-joke film mixing shock with parody and employing a hot young cast. The picture eventually made more than $100 million.

Now there's "Scream 2," which follows the same formula and offers the same sort of limited rewards - a modestly entertaining, youth-oriented movie about a knife-wielding killer in a ghostly mask. The aim is to get the audience shouting, "Don't open that door!" And, to that extent, it works, though less well than its predecessor. Craven, who made the original "A Nightmare on Elm Street" as well as some earlier shock classics like "Last House on the Left" and "The Hills Have Eyes," knows how to torture a viewer's nerves.

In both "Screams," the game is to keep the audience guessing the identity of the psycho killer while providing lots of self-reflexive humor: This is a slasher movie in which the characters hold a wise-guy debate about the effects of film violence; talk about how horrible movie sequels usually are; and lace their conversation with references to Freddy Krueger, "Prom Night," John Carpenter and other topics beloved by horror fans.

The story: Sidney (Neve Campbell of "Party of Five" ), one of the survivors of the "Scream" massacre, is now in college; playing at the local movie theater is "Stab," a slasher film written by ruthless TV reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox, who played the same role in

"Scream" ), who covered the killings in Sidney's hometown, and used them as the basis for "Stab." Craven shows us some scenes from "Stab" : They are a direct imitation of the opening of the original "Scream."

Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson (also of the first "Scream" ) are having a bloody ball, tweaking the audience with this convoluted set-up. And they go beyond tweaking. The (fictional) audience at the "Stab" screening is depicted as a crowd of whooping nitwits who dress in hoods and masks like the on-screen killer and use fake knives to play at being slashers. The nasty fun comes to a grisly end, however, when a young woman (Jada Pinkett) is stabbed to death in the theater.

Thus begins a series of gruesome slayings on campus, where, besides Sidney and Gale, several other characters from the original film are reunited: Sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette), horror film buff and student Randy (Jamie Kennedy), and Cotton (Liev Schreiber), who was wrongly jailed for murder in "Scream."

Notable new characters include Cici (Sarah Michelle Gellar of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" ) and Derek (Jerry O'Connell of "Jerry Maguire" ). The cast is youthful, with TV-familiar faces (and to acknowledge this, Craven offers a funny cameo from Tori Spelling, playing an inept actor).

It would murder the picture to reveal more, so let's just say that, until the killer is unmasked, the filmmakers poke fun all over the map, at sensationalist media; college drama teachers and their productions; numbskull sorority and fraternity types; horror film fans obsessed with "the rules of a sequel" ; and movies of all sorts, from "Psycho" to "Top Gun." It's all pumped up with a crowd-pleasing soundtrack by the likes of Sugar Ray, Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews.

"Scream 2" is a slasher film that mocks slasher films, including Craven's own pictures - and including the first

"Scream." About a dozen people are dispatched, gorily, but the deaths aren't all that scary. For people who like their amusement blood red, "Scream 2" will do the job. It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

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